What are the nvidia cuda cores and what is their importance

The amount of CUDA Cores is one of the data that we most often look at when choosing a GPU for our new PC. But what are CUDA Cores and what is their importance? In this article we explain it to you in a very simple and understandable way.

CUDA Cores, one of the most important data of your GeForce GPU

In a very simple way, CUDA Core is an equivalent of Nvidia's GPUs to CPU cores. These cores are optimized to run a large number of calculations simultaneously, something that is vital for modern graphics. CUDA has long been one of the highlights on the spec sheet of any GeForce graphics card.

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CUDA is an acronym for one of Nvidia's proprietary technologies: Compute Unified Device Architecture. Its purpose? Efficient parallel computing. Compute Unified Device Architecture speeds up GPU compute processes. The technology was developed for graphics processing units by Nvidia. With CUDA, researchers and software developers can send C, C ++, and Fortran codes directly to the GPU without using an assembly code. This simplification takes advantage of parallel computing where thousands of tasks or threads run simultaneously.

A single CUDA core is analogous to a CPU core, with the main difference being that it is less sophisticated but implemented in much greater numbers. A common CPU has between 2 and 16 cores, but the CUDA cores are hundreds or thousands, even on the lowest modern Nvidia GPUs. The GeForce GT 1030 is the simplest GPU of Nvidia at present, it has 384 CUDA Cores, on the other hand, the new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the most advanced card of the company, surpassing 4000 CUDA Cores to offer performance very high.

The importance of CUDA Cores on your PC

A GPU differs from a CPU in many ways, but to put it simply, a CPU is more of an administrator, responsible for controlling the entire PC, while a GPU is the most suitable solution to do the heavy lifting. Graphics processing requires numerous complex calculations to be performed simultaneously, which is why such huge amounts of CUDA cores are implemented in GPUs. Considering that GPUs are specifically designed and optimized for this purpose, their cores can be much smaller than those of the CPU, which are much more versatile.

Essentially, any graphics setup that requires calculations to be performed simultaneously will greatly benefit from an increased CUDA core count. The most obvious are lighting and shadows, but physics are also included, as well as some types of smoothing and ambient occlusion. Where Nvidia has CUDA cores, its main competitor, AMD, has Stream processors.

Now these two technologies, as well as each company's respective GPU architectures, are obviously different. However, fundamentally and functionally, CUDA cores and Stream processors are the same thing. CUDA cores are better optimized, as Nvidia's hardware generally compares to AMD, but there are no noticeable differences in terms of graphics performance or quality.

As is often the case with paper specifications, simply the number of cores in a GPU is not in itself a good indicator of what kind of performance you can expect from a piece of hardware. Many other specs, like VRAM capacity, are more important to consider than CUDA's core count, and there's also the issue of software optimization as well as microarchitecture efficiency.

Because of this, the best way to determine the performance of a GPU is to take a look at some benchmarks. That way, you can know exactly what kind of performance you can expect in a given game.

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All of this is essential about Nvidia's CUDA cores. We hope it has helped you clarify what CUDA cores are, what they do, and how important they are. Above all, we hope we have helped dispel any misconceptions you may have had on the subject.